Hunter Newby and Connected Nation: Kansas Breaks Ground on First IXP

In the geographic center of the United States, a transformative digital infrastructure project is taking root. This spring, Connected Nation (CN) and Wichita State University (WSU) broke ground on what will soon be Kansas’s first carrier-neutral Internet Exchange Point (IXP), a development that promises to reshape regional connectivity dynamics not only across south-central Kansas but also far beyond.

Located just across from WSU’s Innovation Campus, the forthcoming modular facility—developed under the Connected Nation Internet Exchange Points (CNIXP) joint venture—represents a confluence of mission-driven broadband advocacy and private-sector interconnection expertise. At the heart of this effort is the longstanding nonprofit Connected Nation, joined by renowned interconnection pioneer Hunter Newby, whose decades of leadership in neutral colocation and peering ecosystems helped define the U.S. IXP landscape.

“This new IXP is more than just a facility,” said Tom Ferree, Chairman and CEO of Connected Nation, during this episode of the Data Center Frontier Show podcast. “It’s a foundation. What it represents for Wichita—and as an exemplar for the rest of the country—is empowerment.”

Ferree emphasized that the project is the product of a long-cultivated partnership, calling CNIXP “the perfect marriage of competency, know-how, and passion with mission.” Connected Nation, with its 25-year track record of addressing broadband access, adoption, and literacy nationwide, brings public-interest depth to the equation. Newby, with a resume that spans influential roles at Telx, Netrality, and NJFX, supplies the deep interconnection acumen necessary to build a technically resilient, carrier-neutral platform.

But the power of this project lies not just in its pedigree. It’s in the opportunity it creates.

“There’s never been an independent, carrier-neutral IXP in Kansas before,” Ferree noted. “With this action, communities like Wichita are quite literally putting themselves on the map—geographically and digitally.”

Laying the Foundation for a More Connected Heartland

For regions that have long operated at the edge of national peering ecosystems, the absence of local IXPs has meant higher transport costs, higher latency, and lower quality of service, particularly for cloud applications and latency-sensitive workloads like AI and industrial automation. By introducing a local nexus for network interconnection and traffic exchange, CNIXP is inviting competitive networks, cloud providers, and edge platforms to interconnect at a neutral hub—improving resiliency and lowering costs for carriers, enterprises, and institutions across the state.

“We’re literally bringing the internet to Wichita,” Ferree said. “And in doing so, we’re bringing all the quality attributes that suburban and major metro areas have long taken for granted.”

He also warned of what’s at stake for mid-sized cities in the absence of such infrastructure: “If communities like Wichita don’t have proximity to peering opportunities and colocation facilities, the divide—especially in the age of AI—is going to be expensive and crushing.”

The Wichita IXP, he argued, helps rewrite that future. Built on three core tenets—network neutrality, technological agnosticism, and competitive openness—the project offers a template for digital equity through infrastructure design. “Only when those three tenets are met,” Ferree said, “are communities truly on equal footing.”

Building the Internet Where It Doesn’t Yet Exist

For Hunter Newby, the Wichita project is not just another interconnection build—it’s a response to a national blind spot.

“I’ve been building carrier-neutral, multi-tenant interconnection facilities for more than 20 years,” Newby said during the podcast. “What we’re doing in Wichita isn’t just replicating what exists elsewhere. We’re bringing the Internet—literally—into cities and states where it doesn’t yet exist in a localized, neutral form.”

Newby, co-founder of CNIXP and longtime architect of critical network meet-me rooms at iconic properties like 60 Hudson Street in New York and 56 Marietta in Atlanta, helped pioneer the concept of neutral interconnection real estate—buildings and facilities where no single carrier holds dominance, and every network comes to peer and exchange traffic freely. In the past, these hubs were concentrated in major metro areas. But that model, he argues, leaves entire swaths of America underserved.

“There are 14 states in the U.S. today that still don’t have a neutral Internet exchange within their borders,” Newby said. “Kansas was one of them.”

That absence isn’t just an infrastructure gap—it’s a performance and economic liability. Without a local exchange, internet traffic in places like Wichita is often backhauled hundreds of miles away—typically to Kansas City, Missouri—for peering, before looping back to its destination. The result is higher latency, greater cost, and reduced reliability. Most residents and businesses, Newby notes, don’t even realize that their traffic is leaving the state to reach its next hop.

The Wichita IXP turns that paradigm on its head.

“What we’re doing is building a neutral, physical venue where all the networks in the state can meet and exchange traffic directly,” said Newby. “That platform allows local applications to function properly. Without it, they just won’t work.”

And that, he emphasized, is no longer a theoretical concern.

Latency Is the New Divide

As artificial intelligence applications gain traction, the technical demand for proximity is becoming existential. From generative AI tools to real-time inference models deployed in healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics, performance thresholds are tightening—and connectivity is becoming a gating factor for innovation.

“AI inference, in particular, requires low latency. If the distance between sender and receiver is too great, the app simply doesn’t work,” Newby said. “It’s just like the old days of trying to run video over dial-up—it’s not going to happen.”

Newby compared the coming AI infrastructure gap to the uneven rollout of mobile service generations: “In cities with IXPs and dense interconnection, it’s 5G. Step outside, it’s LTE. Further still, 3G. Then 2G. Then nothing. That’s what AI application performance is going to feel like in unserved places.”

Without a neutral exchange, regions like rural Kansas could find themselves effectively shut out of next-generation digital services—unable to run latency-sensitive applications for banking, insurance, autonomous systems, or remote healthcare.

“This is about more than broadband,” Newby emphasized. “It’s about creating a real platform where those broadband connections can actually deliver on their potential.”

A Neutral Home for Localized Digital Ecosystems

What makes this effort especially powerful, Newby said, is the alignment of his infrastructure expertise with Connected Nation’s mission focus. While CN has long worked to expand broadband access in underserved areas, the new venture closes a deeper layer of the divide: the absence of neutral, local interconnection venues.

“It’s not just about getting fiber into communities—it’s about what that fiber connects to,” Newby said. “Without a neutral, carrier-agnostic home for interconnection, traffic can’t stay local. That’s what we’re building.”

Wichita, he explained, represents the blueprint for similar efforts in other underserved states and cities. By working with public universities and mission-aligned partners, CNIXP can establish local IXPs that give communities the technical footing to participate fully in the digital economy.

“We’re targeting the places that have been left out,” Newby said. “And we’re giving them the platform to leap forward.”

Next, the discussion turns to how Wichita State University’s role—and physical footprint—became the catalyst for deploying Kansas’s first IXP, and what that means for its Innovation Campus and the region’s future.

Public Investment as Catalyst: Kansas Sets the Example

While the technical and architectural blueprint of the Wichita IXP represents a milestone in its own right, Tom Ferree was quick to point out that such projects don’t happen in a vacuum. Behind this initiative is a strategic deployment of public-sector investment—precisely the kind of government foresight, he argues, that more states should emulate.

“It’s not just public investment for public investment’s sake,” Ferree explained. “It is a catalyst. And this one is the kind that leverages and catalyzes tremendous economic development.”

The $5 million in state funds that seeded the CNIXP facility in Wichita came through a 2023 grant awarded by Kansas Governor Laura Kelly as part of a broader $28.5 million broadband infrastructure package. That initial commitment, Ferree said, is a textbook example of how government can function as both enabler and accelerator when market dynamics fail to deliver on their own.

“We’re seeing a moment nationally where infrastructure is being redefined,” he added, referencing the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program—part of the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. “Just like the Eisenhower Interstate System or the Rural Electrification Administration before it, this is infrastructure that supports national priorities. And latency is now part of that equation.”

In fact, Ferree views neutral digital infrastructure—the kind represented by the Wichita IXP—as a critical component of national competitiveness, especially as the United States enters a new era of distributed AI workloads and high-performance cloud services. “The race to AI dominance,” he said, “cannot be won without widespread deployment of middle-mile infrastructure—and that includes IXPs.”

Connected Nation was formed, in part, to bridge the trust gap between public and private sectors. Ferree recounted the nonprofit’s roots in early 2000s Kentucky, where state agencies and industry stakeholders needed a neutral facilitator to collaborate on broadband solutions. That philosophy—of serving as a “safe harbor” between government and private industry—has now taken on physical form through CNIXP.

“In a way, we created a neutral venue then,” Ferree said. “Now we’re building a physical one.”

Infrastructure Without Proximity Is Not Infrastructure

Beyond the broadband policy landscape, Ferree returned to a larger concern: the economic and civic viability of smaller cities and rural towns that lack the infrastructure to attract modern digital applications or businesses.

“This is quite literally an existential threat to the viability of some of these communities,” he warned. “If proximity to low-latency interconnection isn’t available, they’re not participating in the digital world—and they’re losing opportunity.”

The risk, he argued, isn’t just slower internet. It’s an ongoing, compounding loss of economic development, workforce potential, and technological relevance. Without local IXPs, communities become less competitive for investment, less attractive to employers, and ultimately less sustainable.

“Applications won’t come to those outposts if the infrastructure isn’t there,” Ferree said. “And when that happens, the transfer of wealth to metro areas accelerates, and America loses an extraordinary part of itself—our small towns, our rural communities, our distributed innovation potential.”

He calls this a digital sustainability issue—one that Kansas, through its strategic grantmaking, is beginning to address head-on. As BEAD funds begin to flow and other states look for replicable models, Kansas’s investment in a carrier-neutral, modular IXP could serve as an early indicator of where infrastructure policy is headed next.

“Latency is the new currency,” Ferree concluded. “And if you don’t have it, you’re not really participating in the digital world.”

Redefining the Internet Exchange Point—From Confusion to Critical Infrastructure
As the conversation shifted to the nature of the facility itself, Hunter Newby offered a deep-dive clarification into the semantics and misconceptions that have long clouded the interconnection industry. At the center of this: the distinction between an Internet Exchange (IX) and an Internet Exchange Point (IXP).

“Terms like ‘data center,’ ‘carrier hotel,’ and even ‘meet-me room’ have been used so broadly for so long, they’ve lost their specificity—especially outside major metro markets,” Newby explained. “To people in rural America, calling it a ‘carrier hotel’ or a ‘meet-me room’ just doesn’t land. They think we’re in the dating business.”

That’s why CNIXP refers to this project simply and directly as an Internet Exchange Point: a neutral, hardened facility where IP networks—defined by their Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs)—can directly peer, connect, and route data efficiently through a public switch fabric.

At the heart of the Wichita IXP will be a co-located Ethernet switch platform operated by DE-CIX, the global leader in IX operations, boasting a presence across dozens of cities, countries, and continents. “DE-CIX is the gold standard,” Newby said. “If there’s a fourth partner in our venture, it’s them.”

By embedding DE-CIX’s neutral switch fabric into a purpose-built colocation environment, the Wichita facility becomes a full-fledged IXP—one that meets the performance, scale, and security needs of next-generation workloads.

Future-Proofing from the Ground Up

Physically, the new facility is no retrofit or side-room conversion. It’s a modular, storm-hardened, purpose-built structure located across the street from Wichita State University’s Innovation Campus. Though modest in initial footprint—just a few thousand square feet—it has been designed with scalability and technical fidelity from day one.

“This is a seed kit,” said Newby. “We’ve distilled the essentials of a neutral meetpoint down into a form that’s cost-effective to deploy in cities like Wichita, without compromising on function.”

Inside, the IXP will include:

• A secured meet-me area for fiber patching and interconnection.
• Power and equipment rooms with generator and UPS redundancy.
• Hot aisle/cold aisle containment for efficient cooling.
• A small conference space for collaboration and network operations coordination.
• Design elements supporting modular expansion with zero downtime.

“This isn’t a closet in a basement. It’s not a repurposed office suite. It’s engineered for what it’s meant to do,” Newby emphasized. “From manholes in the street to fiber conduit entry, to the patch panels and the routers and switches—this is a modern, neutral interconnect site built to global standards.”

And its purpose? To enable localized peering—the direct exchange of IP traffic within the city, without long-haul detours through other states. That’s a future-proofed model for a future that increasingly demands real-time responsiveness.

AI’s Demands Are Here—and Non-Negotiable

Newby tied the technical infrastructure directly to use cases that demand its presence today—not tomorrow.

“We’re already seeing banking applications that rely on AI inference at the edge. Fraud detection platforms are running on Nvidia Blackwell chips, and they need sub–3 millisecond round-trip delay from device to response. That’s not optional. That’s the requirement.”

He described how large financial institutions are deploying fraud detection and protection systems that capture anomalies in real-time—as the keystrokes are happening—and then confirm or block transactions in-flight. That entire logic loop must execute in milliseconds. Without local interconnection, it doesn’t work.

“AI workloads are now behaving like real-time communications apps,” Newby explained. “Just like video conferencing was jittery and unreliable in the dial-up days, AI inference breaks down when latency gets too high. And that’s what’s at stake for places that don’t have neutral IXPs.”

For enterprise and hyperscale application providers, deployment decisions increasingly depend on where their infrastructure can reside—and where it can peer efficiently with local access networks. A city like Wichita, absent a neutral venue, simply wouldn’t be in the running. But now, with CNIXP’s modular facility in place, it is.

“Enterprise applications want to get close to their users. But they need a neutral home to deploy into,” said Newby. “This IXP is that home. Without it, the banks, the clouds, the AIs—they can’t develop.”

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At Data Center Frontier, we talk the industry talk and walk the industry walk. In that spirit, DCF Staff members may occasionally use AI tools to assist with content. Elements of this article were created with help from OpenAI's GPT4.

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